Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

24 Gideon Toury
indulge in when they formulate hypotheses with respect to past instances of
translational behaviour, to be tested against real-life acts which have already
cometotheirend(ortranslatedtextswhicharealreadythere)butwhich
haven’t been subjected to study yet. This however doesn’t seem to be the case.
As I have said before, I believe there is hardly anyone today who would claim
there is complete randomness in the selection of translation strategies and
translational replacements, the more so as those who might have made such
a claim were asked to suspend their disbelief for a while.
At the same time, I guess we would also agree, if only by intuition alone,
that it is hardly the case that all modes of behavior, all phenomena, all resulting
shifts, are equiprobable, that is, have the exact same initial chance of being
selected, irrespective of anything. Rather, it seems that for [almost?] every
complementary pair of possible (‘positive’ and ‘negative’) shifts, one of the
terms – that which has higher probability – would be unmarked and the
other one marked. But which would be which? This is a major issue for
targeted research, especially of the empirical kind, relating to the different
manifestations of the notion of ‘shift’. (As already indicated, the ‘neutral’,
medial phenomenon of ‘no shift’ is practically out of the game as it has a
probability of [almost] nil.)
We have finally landed in the realm of probabilities, which is what I have
been advocating for the last ten years or so. I can still remember a previous
lecture of mine in the Savonlinna School of Translation Studies, back in 1993,
which bore the first half of the present paper’s title and which I never deemed
ripe for publication. That lecture owed a lot to Halliday’s above-mentioned
(and quoted) article “Towards Probabilistic Interpretations” (1991a), where
the notion was applied within the related framework of systemic-functional
linguistics in a way which was then rather novel. (See also Halliday 1991b,
1993b.)
The basic idea underlying my attempts to apply probabilistic explanations
to translations and translation practices was to make consistent efforts to tie
together particular modes of behavior (or their observable results), on the one
hand, with, on the other hand, an array of variables, whose capacity to enhance
(or reduce) the adoption or avoidance of a particular behavior would be
verified empirically, by means of both observational and experimental research.
Even if we were to overlook the problems involved in the quantitative side of
the transition from frequencies to probabilities, there are major qualitative
difficulties inherent in that project, resulting not from the mere vastness of
the said array, but first and foremost from its enormous heterogeneity, asthe
relevant variables will necessarily come from many different sources: some